People

Sighs of relief all round at Manchester University.
Anna Ford, below, may have decided to give up reading the lunchtime news on BBC1 but has no plans to retire as chancellor of Britain's biggest non-federal university. Respected for her commitment and the quality of her hat-doffing at graduation ceremonies, she was in Manchester only last week for the first anniversary of the merger of the Victoria University and the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology.

A spokesman suggests that Ford has not tired of Virgin trains to Manchester and there were no rumours on campus of a resignation letter in the post. Ford graduated from Manchester in 1966 with a degree in economics and became the first woman president of the student union.

Plans may be steaming ahead for stadiums and pools for the London Olympics, but what about food? Chef Albert Roux, owner of London's le Gavroche restaurant, suggested the capital may not be able to feed thousands of sports fans desperate for a bite between the 100m heats and the beach volleyball final. "If the Olympic Games happened tomorrow it would be chaotic," he said. "Even at the top-end restaurants there could be some glitches. The danger area is the mid-market. The mid-market are the people who look for decent food at a good price in the right place which they can afford. Who is going to do this?" He added gloomily: "Do we want to give them snack food which is going to be dreadful?"

Next week Raj Persaud, the only psychiatrist the person in the street is likely to have heard of, will ask whether attractiveness rules the world. He will also offer tips on how we can make ourselves more attractive. This alone could persuade plainer persons to make their way to Barnard's Inn Hall on November 9 when he gives the second of three lectures as visiting professor for the public understanding of psychiatry at Gresham College.

Persaud will say that babies spend more time looking at attractive faces than unattractive ones, which could be bad news for ugly parents. He also suggests we could be genetically or biologically programmed to appreciate beauty, and will discuss "the evolutionary purpose of beauty and its role in our lives".